1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to zoom lenses and, more particularly, to such zoom lenses which have an F-number of 1.2 and as high a zoom range as about 10 and are corrected by using an aspheric surface for high optical performance over the entire zooming range suited to photographic cameras, or video cameras.
2. Description of the Related Art
To the cameras for photography or the video cameras, there has been an increasing demand for zoom lenses of large relative aperture and high range while nevertheless maintaining a high contrast to be achieved for high optical performance.
Of these, the zoom lens for the video camera of home use, for example, is required to have as high a resolving power as, for example, 50 lines/mm in the spatial frequency over the entire area of the picture frame, as the number of picture elements in the image sensor such as CCD increases and the recording method improves to S-VHS or the like.
Proposals for a zoom lens of increased magnification range to 10 or thereabout are made in, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Applications Nos. Sho 54-17042 and Sho 54-23556. This zoom lens comprises, from front to rear, a first lens group of positive power for focusing, a second lens group of negative power for variation of the image magnification, a third lens group of negative power for compensation for the image plane shift resulting from the variation of the image magnification, a fourth lens group for making afocal the light beam coming from the third lens group and a fifth lens group for formation of an image. That is, the use of the so-called 5-group type is proposed in these documents.
With the 5-group type zoom lens, when to achieve great increases in the relative aperture and magnification range, while preserving high optical performance, it becomes important in a general case to appropriately set up various appropriate optical factors over all the lens groups constituting the lens system.
If a simple way of, for example, individually strengthening the refractive powers of the lens groups, or increasing the number of lenses in each lens group is used in the attempt to achieve the increases of the aperture ratio and the magnification range, the size of the entire lens system is caused to increase and, at the same time, the spherical aberration in the paraxial zone of the picture frame, the coma in the intermediate to the marginal zone and higher order aberrations such as sagittal halo also significantly increase largely. Further, the range of variation of aberrations with zooming, too, is increased. Thus, a problem of increasing the difficulty of obtaining a high optical performance will arise. As the related arts, there are those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,812,024 and U.S. patent applications Ser. No. 223,108 filed on July 22, 1988 and Ser. No. 301,951 filed on Jan. 26, 1989.